The Splintered Vow
The winter of 1983 bit harder than usual in Kaiserslautern. January winds swept down from the Pfalz forest, rattling the windows of the brothel and carrying rumors of fresh protests in Bonn against NATO’s planned deployment of Pershing II missiles. On the radio, Nena’s “99 Luftballons” played endlessly, balloons mistaken for UFOs that somehow captured the era’s nervous laughter.
Downstairs, the bar smelled of wet wool, cigarette smoke, and spilled Pilsner. American airmen argued over the latest news at Ramstein while German locals drank beers in silence, The American bases paying the bills and pushing into their lives.
Frau Metzger sat at her ledger like a sentinel, cigarette ash growing long as she counted the night’s slow take. “Too cold tonight,” she muttered.
Hanno worked at a loose radiator valve, turning his wrench with steady, methodical care. He grunted in agreement, eyes drifting to the staircase where the girls came and went like ghosts in lingerie.
Room 9 belonged to Marta Kowalski. Walls nearly bare: a single postcard of Kraków’s Wawel Castle, edges curling; a wooden crucifix, face-down in her top drawer because looking at it felt like mockery; a battery radio tuned low to Polish-language broadcasts from Radio Free Europe when reception allowed. A plain gray wool bedspread, bought cheap at the Kaiserslautern flea market. Nothing personal showed except the faint scent of violet water she used to mask the bleach and sex. At thirty-one, Marta still had the sturdy build of a Silesian girl who hauled coal buckets on broad shoulders, strong hands, ash-blonde hair pinned severely back. Her eyes, gray like winter skies, gave nothing away.
She arrived in the west in the spring of 1980 with Jan, her husband of four months, clutching a tourist visa and dreams of factory work in Mannheim. Jan lasted half a year; disappearing with a German secretary and most of their savings. The visa expired, the landlord demanded rent in other currencies, the brothel’s door stayed open when factory gates slammed shut. Marta learned quickly: emotions locked, the body is like machinery; efficient, durable, impersonal. Clients satisfied; she’s safe, secure and intact.
When Frau Metzger knocked that January evening, her voice carried an unusual note of amusement. “Quiet night. One more for you, young, Berliner. Paid for an hour but asked specifically for the ‘Polish one.’ Says he doesn’t want the usual.” Concerned, “Be careful. These punks and their ideas.”
Marta smoothed her simple black slip, checked her reflection with detachment, and opened the door.
The boy, maybe early twenties, stood shifting from foot to foot in scuffed Doc Martens. Violent orange mohawk, leather jacket covered in hand-painted anarchy symbols and safety pins. A faint smell of woodsmoke and cheap beer about him, the scent of West Berlin squats drifting all the way to the provinces. He gave a nervous half-smile.
“I’m Klaus,” he said, though Marta suspected it wasn’t his real name. Berliners often traveled with fake names these days.
She closed the door. “What do you want, Klaus?”
He raised both hands like surrender. “Not… not sex. Something else.”
From his jacket he produced a folded sheet of paper, thick, official-looking, but clearly homemade. A mock marriage certificate, complete with potato-stamped seals and ridiculous invented names: Maria Schneider and Andi Müller. He unfolded it carefully.
“My friend Andi got his draft notice for the Bundeswehr. He’s a pacifist, won’t go. There’s a loophole: he marries a non-EC national with residency issues, he can claim family hardship. Deferment, maybe exemption.” Klaus’s words tumbled fast, Berlin dialect clipping the edges. “A sympathetic clerk at the Kreuzberg Standesamt owes me. We just need a bride willing to sign. You’re Polish, it’s perfect. Already here, no awkward questions.”
Marta stared at the paper, then at him. “And you chose me.”
“You look…” He hesitated, cheeks flushing under remnants of eyeliner. “Tired of being wanted for the wrong reasons.”
The irony struck her like cold water. Three years of selling access to her body in measured doses, mouth, hands, cunt, now someone wanted her for a transaction that required none of it. She laughed, a short, dry sound. “You think that makes you better? Paying for a name instead of a fuck?”
Klaus flinched but held her gaze. “I think it makes it honest. No pretending.”
They sat on opposite corners of the bed, fully clothed, the space between them wider than the room. He explained the plan in urgent whispers: a quick civil ceremony with forged papers, a shared address on file, a few months of pretending. In return: half his monthly contributions from the squat collective, help renewing her residence permit through a left-wing lawyer network in Frankfurt. No physical obligation. Ever.
Marta listened, arms folded tight across her chest. The radiator clanked as Hanno tightened the valve downstairs; a jet roared low overhead, practicing touch-and-go landings at Ramstein. The room felt airless, as if the proposal had sucked out the oxygen.
Everyone who entered this room wanted her, wanted her mouth, hands, pussy, asshole, they all want sex. This one wanted to bind her legally while leaving her body untouched. The absence of desire felt cruel, invasive, worse than the fucking.
“Why no sex?” she asked finally.
Klaus shrugged, embarrassed. “I don’t want to use you like that. And… I’m not really into…” He trailed off, cheeks burning. The implication hung: perhaps he preferred boys, perhaps he was simply terrified of intimacy. Didn’t matter.
She looked at the certificate again, a fake. The blank line waited for her signature like an open trap. For a dangerous moment she imagined signing it: a marriage without fucking, a vow that didn’t demand a blowjob. Game the system that had gamed her. A splinter of agency in a life built on nothing, compromise?
The jukebox downstairs shifted to The Cure, Robert Smith’s detached voice drifting up the stairs. Marta felt the eerie pull of possibility, the sense that this cold, sexless bargain might be the closest she would ever come to choosing a story that was hers and hers alone.
“I need to think,” she said. “Come back tomorrow.”
Klaus’s face flooded with desperation. He left the certificate on the dresser beside a small stack of marks, “for your time tonight,” and slipped out, boots echoing down the hall.
Marta did not sleep. She was on her back staring at the ceiling’s water stain. It looked vaguely like a map of Poland before the partitions. The certificate glowed faintly in the lamplight. She pictured Jan’s face the day he left, casual, almost apologetic, abandoning her were just another bureaucratic inconvenience. She pictured her mother’s letters from Katowice, pleading for money to fix the roof, or medicine for babcia, any one of a dozen others. She pictured a life where a man cock might be a choice instead of an obligation. a necessity, a life without swallowing cum from a cock that didn’t stink. No foul breath panting over her.
At 3 a.m. she rose, lit a cigarette, and practiced signing the fake name, Maria Schneider, in looping cursive on scrap paper. The pen felt heavier than any mans balls.
Morning brought gray light and Hanno brought news. He knocked once, expression unreadable as always. “That punk won’t be back. Polizei raided a squat on Pfalzburger Straße last night, draft dodgers, suspected RAF sympathizers. Half the kids in cells.”
Marta felt the floor tilt slightly. “Klaus?”
Hanno nodded. “Orange hair. They took him.”
Frau Metzger confirmed it later over coffee, voice dry. “Berlin punks and their revolutions. At least he paid.”
The day passed in slow motion. Marta cleaned her room mechanically, scrubbing surfaces that were already clean. She tore the practice signatures into confetti and let them drift into the waste bin. The real certificate she folded once, twice, then slipped into her drawer beside the face-down crucifix.
That evening the brothel filled again. The cold had broken; They streamed in American sergeants flush with payday dollars, local mechanics escaping wives and children. “Der Kommissar” blasted from the jukebox, warning that everything was watched, everything controlled.
Marta’s first client was a loud master sergeant from Ramstein, beer-sour breath and impatient hands. He wanted her on her knees first, normal. She performed with efficiency: mouth working him steadily, eyes fixed on the wall, mind blank. When he pushed her onto the bed and entered her roughly, she counted ceiling cracks, breathed through the discomfort, waited for the inevitable grunt and pulse.
After he left, balls empty, wallet lighter, she sat on the edge of the bed in her robe and felt… steady. The chaos was familiar. Predictable. Her body obeyed; her heart stayed locked. No weird promises, no fragile hope, just flesh, and cum.
In the quiet hour before dawn, she opened the drawer. The certificate lay there like a dead thing. She tore it into strips, useless garbage, watching the fake names disappear. The crucifix she left face-down.
Downstairs, Ayla laughed brightly at a trucker’s joke, Ilse stared into her beer, Dani counted tips with sharp eyes. Hanno wiped the bar in slow circles, looking up as Marta came down the stairs. Their eyes met briefly. She nodded once, thanks, acknowledgment, or simple recognition of shared silence. He nodded back and returned to his cloth.
Outside, snow was falling again, soft and soundless. The F-4’s flew overhead, their afterburners painting brief orange streaks across the low clouds. Inside Room 9, Marta lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and prepared for the next knock.
The vow had splintered before it could form, leaving only the faint, eerie echo of what might have been: a marriage built on absence, a promise that asked for nothing and could break without ever touching her. What remained was the the honest brutality of cock, currency she still controlled, and the chaos she understood.
And strangely, in the cold January light, that felt almost like mercy.
